Jim Williams, a doctoral student from the University of Sheffield, who is in Berkeley writing his dissertation in archaeology;

Gary Moring, a philosophy professor at the University of Phoenix.

Congratulations!To the following:Paul Bunje who passed his oral with flying colors;
Marc Carrasco who was awarded a two year NSF Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship through the Biology Program;Scott Nichols who received a Research Internship with P.A.G. Barnes at the Smithsonian Tropical Reserach Institution in Panama for this coming summer;Sarah Rieboldt as one of 25 Berkeley graduate students in the physical, biological and social sciences to be awarded a grant in aid of research from the Berkeley Chapter of Sigma Xi;Ross Nehm who will be moving to his second NSF postdoctoral fellowship, working jointly with Steve Gould at Harvard and Jim Rohlf at Stonybrook;Marta deMaintenon who assumes a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii, Hilo;Tony Barnosky for his NSF grant for a GIS analysis to assess the effect of large-scale perturbations in the physical environment on the evolution of neogene mammal faunas in the western United States;Carole Hickman, who will be spending this June as a Visiting Scientist at the University of Hawaiis Kewalo Marine Laboratory;Dave Lindberg and Judy Scotchmoor who received additional funding from the National Science Foundation for the Explorations Through Time project;

And to Jere Lipps whose continued efforts to combat scientific illiteracy rated the following success story:

Dear Dr. Lipps,
This is to thank you for posting Beyond Reason: Science and the Mass Media on the Web. I am the Public Health Officer in Sacramento County. We have had public hearings regarding community water fluoridation. The members of our Board of Supervisors were bombarded with literature from those opposing fluoridation who claimed they had scientific proof that fluoridation causes cancer, hip fractures, etc.Your chapter helped me frame the issues in a rational manner, which gave the members of the Board a reference point against which to judge the validity of the claims they were hearing. I quoted your chapter in my report, particularly the eight skills for critical thinking (from Wade and Travis,) and the six rules for evidential reasoning you quote from Lett. I also took the liberty of quoting your statistics on scientific illiteracy today in my verbal presentation before the Board. They voted unanimously to fluoridate the water in Sacramento County.
Thank you for helping me educate the policy makers in my community about what is good science and what is pseudoscience.

Sincerely,

Glennah Trochet, M.D.

UCMP Student AwardsCongratulations to our students, recipients of the following awards:Anna Thompson  The Annie Alexander Fellowship to support her research on the biogeography of latest Cretaceous and early Paleocene fossil leaf floras.Amy Lesen  The D.K. Palmer Prize for support of her research on the population dynamics of foraminifera living in San Francisco Bay.John Hutchinson  The Samuel P. and Doris Welles Award to support his research on the evolution of locomotion in dinosaurs and birds, and the 3-D computer modeling of the stance and gait of Tyrannosaurus rex.